Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/670

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
648
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the maker nine years before he could say it was done. The clock is about nine feet high, and there are sixty-three figures that move by machinery. There are only twenty-two moving figures in the Strasburg clock. On the front of the Wilkesbarre clock—the one we are speaking of—there are three shelves or balconies. Along the lower balcony a mounted general leads a file of Continental soldiers. The liberty-bell rings, and a sentinel salutes the procession. A door in the upper balcony opens and shows Molly Pitcher, who fires her historic cannon, the smoke of which is blown away from the interior of the clock by a fan. Then the portraits of the first twenty Presidents of the United States pass along in a kind of panorama, the Declaration of Independence being held aloft by Thomas Jefferson. On another of the balconies the twelve apostles go by; Satan comes out, and the cock crows for the benefit of Peter. When Christ appears, a figure of Justice raises a pair of scales, while a figure of Death tolls the minutes upon a bell.

Fig. 6.—The Hazleton Clock.

All things considered, the most wonderful of all the large clocks constructed in America (Fig. 6) is the one made by a watchmaker of Hazleton, Pennsylvania—a piece of work that shows forty-eight moving figures, and that it has taken the lifetime of the inventor to produce.